Amazon.com lockers, which are now at many Sacramento-area retail sites, allow online shoppers to retrieve their orders in a secure setting and thwart would-be porch package thieves. This one is at a Sacramento Safeway. Mark Glovermglover@sacbee.com

Amazon.com lockers, which are now at many Sacramento-area retail sites, allow online shoppers to retrieve their orders in a secure setting and thwart would-be porch package thieves. This one is at a Sacramento Safeway. Mark Glovermglover@sacbee.com

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Even so, in September, Amazon officials privately conceded that the number of online orders might exceed the available space in lockers during the holiday season, a situation the company said it planned to monitor.

Amazon spokesman Jim Billimoria said there are about 40 lockers in the Sacramento area. The Seattle-based retailer said it has no hard numbers of how many customers have been locked out of Amazon Locker deliveries.

He did, however, note this: “We do handle a lot of orders.”

On Cyber Monday in 2015, Billimoria said Amazon customers ordered more than 54 million items worldwide, which equated to a record-breaking 629 items per second.

By all indications, it was even busier this year. Monday’s overall online sales binge in the United States alone hit a record $3.45 billion, up 12 percent over 2015, according to Adobe Digital Insights.

Amazon officials said number of online orders might exceed the available locker space during the holiday shopping season.

Billimoria said the retail giant recently upgraded its checkout system to “gray out” full lockers within a given geographic area. Previously, a customer at Amazon’s online checkout page had to go through a list of local lockers one by one to determine if space was available.

Amazon.com shoppers select the locker they’d like for delivery when checking out. When the package arrives, the customer receives an email and text message with a code to retrieve their order.

Locally, most of the lockers are in Safeway markets, but 7-Eleven, Sprint stores and Circle K also have them.

Officials noted earlier this year that the program was in its early stages and might expand over time. Along that line, the number of lockers in the Sacramento area has nearly doubled in just the past couple of months.

Amazon, which launched the lockers in 2011, has since installed them nationwide. Lockers can be found at amazon.com/findalocker.